Then he turns.
Our eyes meet for exactly one second. Maybe two. I am close enough to the counter now that there is no walking this back, no pretending I was aiming for a table.
He looks at me the way you look at something you've been expecting and dreading in approximately equal measure. No surprise. No performance. He takes me in — the city clothes, the haircut, all of it — and something in his face settles into a careful, contained stillness.
"Grace," he says.
One word. My name. His voice is lower than it used to be, rougher.
I open my mouth.
He puts money on the counter, stands up and walks out.
The bell above the door rings.
I sit down on the nearest stool because my legs need a moment to consult with my brain about what just happened. The waitress appears and sets down a coffee without being asked, the way Silver Ridge does things, and I wrap both hands around the mug and stare at the counter.
The diner went briefly quiet when he left. At least no one stopped mid-sentence, no one turned to stare at me. It was the briefer, subtler quiet of a room full of people who grew up here and know exactly what just happened and are politely pretending they don't.
Silver Ridge remembers.
It remembers everything.
I drink my coffee. My hands are steady. I am a professional. I am not twenty-three years old anymore. I am not the woman who sat in her car outside this town for twenty minutes the summer she left, trying to convince herself she was making the right choice.
I finish the coffee and leave a ten on the counter.
Outside, the August evening is still warm, the mountains pink at the tops. Down the block I can see the festival grounds, the yellow banners, the first vendor tents going up. The town is full of that pre-event energy — work trucks, voices, the smellof sawdust from wherever they're building the competition platforms.
How the hell am I going to manage this?
two
Owen
Thefestivalgroundstakeup the field behind the community center, and in the week before opening they turn into organized chaos. Competition platforms go up. The log-rolling tank gets filled. Vendors claim their spaces and start building out stalls. The whole operation requires about forty people and about twice as much coordination as anyone wants to admit, and I've been running the competition setup for the last six years because no one else has the patience for it and because I'm here, always here, the way the mountain is here.
I get to the grounds at six in the morning. Earlier than I need to. I need to move.
The platform lumber is staged by the equipment shed — rough-cut spruce, same as always. My crew shows up by seven: Dale and his nephew Brody, who is nineteen and useful if you point him at something concrete, and Martin from the mill, who I've worked with for eight years and who communicates almost entirely in hand gestures. We start building. The axe-throwing lane gets three platforms — competition throw, warm-up, spectator barrier. It takes most of the morning.
By noon the lane is framed and I'm sinking posts for the target mounts. Physical work is good. It moves the thing that's been sitting in my chest since I walked out of the diner last night. I can feel it in the set of my shoulders — Dale notices, I can tell. He's worked with me long enough to read the difference between focused and closed off, and right now I'm the latter, and he gives me space, which is why I keep him around.
I thought I was ready to see her.
I thought:ten years is a long time.You've gone ten years without a problem. You've dated women, you've been fine. The town stopped mentioning her name around you after the first couple of years. You've built a life here — a real one, crew, truck, cabin that's fully paid off, the kind of deep-root stability that suits you. You are fine.
And then she walked into the diner and I looked at her face and the decade fell completely off.
She looks different. That's true. City-cut hair, the quality of her clothes, a way of carrying herself that is polished. But her eyes are the same. Dark, steady, the ones I used to see when I closed mine in the first year after she left.
Brody drops a post and swears. I look at him.
"Sorry," he says.
"Plumb it before you brace it."
"Yes, sir."
